The Making of Donald Trump (5 page)

Trump said nothing about whether he or his siblings might have had any familial or moral obligation to advise his nephew of Fred Sr.’s plans, especially since he stood to add millions to his own inheritance if the fortune was cut into fourths rather than fifths.

Maryanne Trump Barry weighed in, too. She said that Fred Jr.’s children, Mary and Fred III, were “absentee grandchildren” whom the grandparents saw only on holidays.

Donald, testifying under oath in the lawsuit challenging Fred Sr.’s will, made it clear he thought that Fred Jr.’s children had benefitted more than enough from the family fortune. “They live like kings and queens,” he said under oath. “This is not two people left out in the gutter.”

Years later, while seeking the Republican presidential nomination, Trump was asked about the estate tax dispute and the withdrawal of medical coverage for little William. Trump was unapologetic, a stance consistent with his statements that he has never had a reason to seek God’s forgiveness and never has. “Why do I have to repent or seek God’s forgiveness if I am not making mistakes?” Trump asked an Iowa audience of evangelicals in 2015. The report on this in the
Christian Post
quoted his words, then referred to Trump’s “alleged Christian faith.”

Trump said his pique at the challenge to his father’s will motivated the termination of all medical benefits for the sick child. “I was angry because they sued,” he told journalist Jason Horowitz.

Fred Jr.’s line was cut out of the will, Donald said, not because he and the surviving siblings had exercised any influence over their father, but because Fred Sr. had a “tremendous
dislike” for the flight attendant his son had married. In that, Fred Sr. would have been channeling his own paternal grandmother, who disapproved of his father Friedrich’s choice of the German-born Elizabeth Christ as his wife.

Trump went on to say that the cases were settled “very amicably.” Neither Fred III nor his mother would comment when asked about Donald’s remarks—which would be consistent with a settlement requiring no public disclosure by any of the parties. The “very amicable” terms remain unknown because the settlement was sealed. What provisions, if any, were made for the lifelong care of William, whose seizures eventually developed into cerebral palsy, are also unknown.

Donald Trump’s application of his motto of vengeance on his blood relatives, a motto directly contrary to the most basic teaching of all Christian faiths, caused deep division within his family. In contrast to this, he had years earlier developed a close relationship with one of the most vicious and heartless men who ever lived in America, a mentor who also believed revenge was the best policy and who became a kind of second father: the notorious Roy Cohn.

I
n 1970—two years after getting his college degree from Penn—Donald Trump was still living in Queens. He was an outer-borough guy, part of the group derided as “bridge and tunnel people” by the stylish Manhattanites. Trump wanted to join and eventually lead that fashionable tribe.

Trump has boasted often that he was on the hunt “almost every night” for “beautiful young women,” but he was also trying to make other significant connections. One of the first and most important connections was with the notorious attorney Roy Cohn. Cohn had been the chief lawyer for Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose communist witch hunts only ended when he went after the United States Army.

By Trump’s account, Cohn became a business mentor and nearly a second father to him. Their steadily deepening relationship would link Trump to mob-owned construction companies at a time when other builders were begging the FBI to crack down on the Mafia.
It also ensnared Trump in a jewelry
tax scam and in a lawsuit that blew up in his face.
In Cohn, Trump had someone who could be “vicious” on his behalf and who he said, looking back in 2005, “would brutalize for you.”

While the timeline is fuzzy, Trump says that to become part of the Manhattan crowd he rented what he called a crummy little apartment with a view of a water tank at Third Avenue and 75th Street on the East Side.
Then he set out to join Le Club, which Trump regarded as “the hottest club in the city and perhaps the most exclusive—like Studio 54 at its height. Its membership included some of the most successful men and most beautiful women in the world. It was the sort of place where you were likely to see a wealthy seventy-five-year-old guy walk in with three blondes from Sweden.”

At Le Club, Trump met and studied a lot of rich men from New York and abroad, including Cohn, whom he had known by reputation.

“
I don’t kid myself about Roy,” Trump wrote. “He was no Boy Scout. He once told me he’d spent more than two thirds of his adult life under indictment on one charge or another.” Such a revelation might repulse some people, but Trump’s reaction was: “That amazed me.”

Trump first hired Cohn to sue the federal government. In the summer of 1972, the federal government investigated claims of racial bias involving a number of apartment house operators, including the Trumps, who owned 14,000 apartments in Brooklyn. It was not the first allegation of Trump bias.
Fred Trump had faced similar accusations two decades earlier, both from the government and from legendary folk singer Woody Guthrie.

Guthrie had moved into an apartment at Beach Haven, Fred Trump’s first major housing project, in 1950, soon after the six-building, 1,800-unit apartment project was completed.
Guthrie noticed that everyone around him was white, and started writing about the rental policies at what he called “bitch havens”:

Guthrie is best known for “This Land Is Your Land,” his ballad about the Dust Bowl, which gave farmers in his native Oklahoma an extra kick in the pants during the Great Depression. He set his thoughts about Trump’s rental policies to a song he titled “Old Man Trump.” The lyrics continue with this:

More than two decades later, in July 1972, the federal government authorized a series of field tests for compliance with the 1968 Fair Housing Act, which Congress had passed into law one week after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. In these tests, a black woman or man or couple was sent to ask about renting an apartment. When they were told none were available, whites with the same information about their
employment and income showed up.
At Trump’s Shore Haven apartments, the superintendent told a white woman she could have her pick of two units shortly after a black woman had been told there were no vacancies.

The Trumps did rent to African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and others not considered white, but only in certain buildings that were heavily minority, government investigators said. Court records showed that minority applicants were routinely steered to these other properties.

The Justice Department sued Donald Trump, his father, and Trump Management “for refusing to rent dwellings and negotiate the rental of dwellings with persons because of race and color.” The case, filed in October 1973, was one of the highest profile racial discrimination cases of the many filed in federal courthouses in the wake of the Fair Housing Act.

Most big landlords settled quickly to avoid nasty publicity, agreeing to keep track of the racial mix of tenants, to advertise to non-whites, and to take other steps to comply with federal law.
But Donald Trump sought advice from Cohn in what he says was their first conversation (even though Trump has testified under oath that he met Cohn three years earlier).

Trump wrote that he told Cohn, “I don’t like lawyers,” because they delay deals, say no, and “are always looking to settle instead of fight.” Cohn surprised him by expressing agreement. Asked for his advice on what to do about the discrimination lawsuit, which Trump says an unnamed Wall Street law firm had advised settling, Cohn said, “Tell them to go to hell and fight the thing in court and let them prove that you discriminated,” adding that Trump had no obligation to “rent to tenants who would be undesirable, white or black.” Cohn also counseled that the accusation of racist practices would stick with Trump, so the young real estate mogul needed to defend his name.

Two months after this supposed first conversation with Cohn, Trump held a press conference at the New York Hilton, where he accused the Justice Department of fabricating a case just to force him and his father to rent to people on welfare, even though the case was about racial discrimination, not welfare.
Cohn filed a lawsuit demanding $100 million in damages from the federal government. This marked a key moment in Trump’s career, adopting the tactic that would be a core tenet of his 2016 presidential bid: hitting back harder when he feels attacked.

The government’s lawsuit and Trump’s countersuit were heard in federal court in Brooklyn a few weeks later. Cohn squared off against a twenty-six-year-old government lawyer on her first big case, an uneven match of experience that should have benefitted the Trump side. In a sworn statement, Trump asserted that neither he nor his company “to the best of my knowledge discriminated or [has] shown bias in renting our apartments.” The judge was savvy enough to note the key phrase in the affidavit, which was Trump’s knowledge, not any actual discrimination by the company and its employees.

Cohn argued that a government census of Trump’s tenants was unnecessary, because the Trumps had seen black people in several of their buildings. He added that he had personally driven by and seen black people walking into or out of “some” Trump buildings without specifying whether these were the buildings where the lawsuit said blacks were steered or the ones the government said were kept all white.

Other facts pointed to Trump’s wrongdoing. The government had been told by Trump employees that when blacks insisted on filling out an application at one of the whites-only Trump buildings, the applications were coded with “No. 9” or “C.” Elyse Goldweber, the novice Justice Department lawyer,
told the court that one employee who spoke to investigators was not being named because “he was afraid that the Trumps would have him ‘knocked off,’ or words to that effect” for revealing the techniques used to deny blacks and other minorities. Cohn’s response was to accuse another government lawyer of soliciting false testimony and conducting “Gestapo-like interrogation” of Trump employees.

Federal judge Edward R. Neaher dismissed as “utterly without foundation” Cohn’s claims of official misconduct. Judge Neaher also dismissed Trump’s countersuit and allowed the government to proceed with the original suit and investigation, satisfied that enough evidence existed for that case to go forward.

In
The Art of the Deal
, Trump said he told Cohn, “I’d rather fight than fold, because as soon as you fold once you get the reputation” of someone who settles cases. But faced with a case in which neither facts nor the law were on his side, Trump folded and settled.
A government press release heralded the settlement as “one of the most far reaching ever” to end racial discrimination in housing. The settlement required the running of advertisements to solicit non-white tenants and an end to all discriminatory practices—including the secret coding of rental applications.

Trump handled the adverse settlement the way he had learned from his father: by spinning the news and offering a simple and quotable narrative, exploiting the fact that most reporters accurately quote what people say without understanding legal rules or regulatory practice.
The settlement was a complete loss for Trump, but he spun the case as a massive win, writing, “In the end the government couldn’t prove its case, and we ended up making a minor settlement without admitting any guilt.”
The government routinely lets people
who settle get off without admitting to any wrongdoing, so long as they agree to stop what they don’t have to admit they were up to.

Trump’s takeaway from this early loss was not that times had changed and civil rights laws would be enforced. He wrote that he learned to make sure Cohn, and presumably other lawyers who followed, was fully prepared when a case went to court. He also learned to place loyalty above all else.

Even if he privately disagreed, or if pursuing a case was not in Cohn’s best interest, “you could count on him to go to bat for you,” Trump wrote. Loyalty, he continued, was far more important than “all the hundreds of ‘respectable’ guys who make careers out of boasting about their uncompromising integrity but have absolutely no loyalty.” That is, of course, the kind of perspective we expect from mobsters, dictators, and others whose primary regard is for unflinching support, not for allegiance to truth or facts.

The settlement required two years of federal oversight. No significant problems arose, so oversight ended. In the third year, the government filed a new complaint, asserting that discrimination in rentals resumed when oversight ended.

In a few years, Trump would learn that Cohn came with another benefit. Hiring him could ensure that his Manhattan construction projects moved smoothly.
Among Cohn’s other clients were two of America’s most powerful Mafia figures who controlled key unions attached to demolition and construction in New York City.

I
n
The Art of the Deal
, Trump boasts that when he applied for a casino owner’s license in 1981, he persuaded the New Jersey attorney general to limit the investigation of his background. It was perhaps the most lucrative negotiation of Trump’s life, one that would embarrass state officials a decade later when Trump’s involvement with mobsters, mob associates, and swindlers became clearer.